I can assure you that Ham doesn't understand evolutionary biology, nor does he understand how science works.
Ham and his ilk are not willing to follow the evidence where it leads, and to change his position as a result. He knows the conclusion he wants to come to, and works backwards from there.

I think you are right, but bobbied is right too. Ham knows his own arguments and how to present them in a way that may sound good and deceive the uninformed. He has lots of experience and practice doing it. Complicated truths are often hard to defend in a short space of time allowed for in a debate, but simplistic attacks that may require involved responses are easy to make. Ken Ham's bat-sh-t crazy ideas won't necessarily preclude him from coming off better looking in the debate.

I have posted here as a Christian, gotten some support and some flaming from internet atheists on the site, though not much because I try to be a good slashdot citizen with most of my posts having nothing to do with religion per se. So, I am surprised by the relative balance here and think that most of the posters have been too easy on the Catholic Church and the Pope -- the opposite of what I usually see. Galileo may have been an asshole in some respects and provoked the reaction against him. I don't think it is uncommon in true Geniuses of his type to behave this way. But now a days we do not try our resident Geniuses before a kangaroo court of law or inquisition and force them to plead guilty of crimes that shouldn't be crimes and that they didn't do anyway, recant under the threat of torture, burn their work and publicly condemn them in every university, then sentence them to life imprisonment. (This sentence was commuted to permanent house arrest after the trial.)

As I am sure you know, Android is built on top of Linux. I have one Android phone, but haven't used it as a desktop OS at all. Do you know if it is relatively simple to add free or open source software to the few Android desktop devices now available? It seems to me that so long an Android is not locked down for desktop users that we would gain much that we look for in Linux.
Also, I keep seeing more and more business applications migrating to a web-centric OS neutral model using servers that are Linux based.

Not lied to... it used to be safer simply because widely distributed consumer Linux based devices (and hence malware targeted at those devices) didn't exists a few years ago. With the current changes in the market we will now see a flood of Android and Linux based malware.

massivepanic writes: For all the buzz about the new Kinect that will ship with the Xbox One, there are remarkably few facts to go around. Sources trumpet its infrared-enabled ability to detect motion in a dark room, for example, but so could the original Kinect. Taking a look at what we know about the new Kinect, it isn’t at all clear whether it is an exciting breakthrough or just a group of incremental updates.

An anonymous reader writes: Google on Tuesday released Chrome version 27 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version features a big boost to page loads (now 5 percent faster on average) as well as significant updates for developers. You can update to the latest release now using the browser’s built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome.

jeditobe writes: KolibriOS is a small open source x86 operating system written completely in assembly. It was forked off from MenuetOS in 2004 and run under independent development since. KolibriOS has applied as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2013, but got rejected by Google. Now KolibriOS goes on Kickstarter to hold its own Summer of Code 2013

An anonymous reader writes: I run a small software consulting company who outsources most of it's work to contractors. I market myself as being able to handle any technical project but only really take the fun ones, then shop it around to developers who are interested.

I write excellent product specs, provide bug tracking & source control and in general am a programming project manager with empathy for developers. I don't ask them to work weekends and I provide detailed, reproducible bug reports and I pay on time. The only 'rule' (if you can call it that) is: I do not pay for bugs. Developers can make more work for themselves by causing bugs and with the specifications I write there is no excuse for not testing their code.

Developers are always fine with it until we get toward the end of a project and the customer is complaining about bugs. Then all of a sudden I am asking my contractors to work for 'free' and they can make more money elsewhere. Ugh.

Every project ends up being a pissing match, so, I think the solution is to finally hire someone fulltime and pay for everything (bugs or not) and just keep them busy. But how can I make that transition? The guy I'd need to hire would have to know a LOT of languages and be proficient in all of them and I can't afford to pay someone $100K/year right now.

msm1267 writes: The Sunshop targeted espionage malware campaign has hit a number of Korean military and political-strategy websites, as well as a Uyghur forum with a pair of Java exploits and the IE 8 zero-day recently used against the U.S. Department of Labor and a number of other sites. The exploits were redirecting vulnerable visitors to sunshop[.]com[.]tw where a host of malware awaits including Lady Boyle, which has been deployed in other attacks against the Uyghur, in particular, and in the Winnti attacks.

An anonymous reader writes: Seth Ladd has an excellent write-up of Dart "When Dart was originally launched, many developers mistook it for some sort of Java clone. In truth, Dart is inspired by a range of languages such as Smalltalk, Strongtalk, Erlang, C#, and JavaScript. Get past the semicolons and curly braces, and you’ll see a terse language without ceremony. "

It seems to me that you have labeled this as a fallacy known as "appeal to belief" incorrectly. The 97% are not just anybody, but are papers from peer reviewed journals. These are authorities. The argument in this case is an appeal to authority, but it is not a fallacious appeal because in this case, the ones claiming to be authorities in fact are so qualified.

The study is just another case in point demonstrating the strong consensus among climate scientists that AGW is real.

You are quite right. I have always regarded myself as pro-life because I believe that an unborn human with an operating brain and beating heart is a human being and has an inherit right to life. But I parted ways with much of the pro-life community on defining the start of life at conception. My problem is how can we regard a zygote prior to forming a blastocyst as a individual human life when life is so fungible at that stage. I mean, we can split the zygote and get more than one individual in the form of identical twins or triplets. Or two zygotes and become fused and form one individual who is a chimera.
The logic of regarding zygotes as humans has other pitfalls as well. Since 50% of zygotes fail to implant, then the very act of having a child implicitly involves the slaughter of just as many other humans as are produced by having a child. Does this make all natural birth parents murderers? And now that we know, are they all now premeditated murderers?

had she opted to put this in a glass bottle and screw the metal cap back on like a real deviant some people could have been hurt, that hurls glass out at a pretty good clip and could easily slice some people up. She's a terrorist.

I remember doing similar ridiculous experiments with the "science club" during Junior High. I was an irresponsible jerk, but not a "terrorist". It was a different era so nothing happened to me. This girl was just goofing around in an otherwise very good way -- no intent to harm anyone and no one was harmed. She should get a figurative slap on the hand and move on. The school and the police are being ridiculous.